Cabaret for the End of the World comes to the Chichester Fringe – a chance to meet Montselier, the last accordionist of the apocalypse, who has come to perform in the wasteland of what used to be Chichester.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00Good morning. My name is Phil Hewitt, Rupal's editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely to speak
00:07to Cathy Whipple today. Now, Cathy, you are bringing Cabaret for the End of the World
00:11to the Chichester Fringe, a date on June the 10th in Havana. And goodness, it's lovely
00:18for you to be doing this in a place where you spent so much time as a child. But this
00:23is a warning, isn't it, this piece? What's it warning us against or about?
00:27Yeah. So it's a very darkly comedic fable, essentially set in a post-apocalyptic United
00:35Kingdom, follows the last accordion player of the apocalypse, Monsellia, as she comes
00:41to the wasteland of Chichester. And it's essentially a warning to be grateful for what we've got
00:47while we got it, and to look after our world a little more.
00:51Presumably you think that we aren't grateful and we don't look after. Well, we don't, and
00:55we're not, are we?
00:56Yeah, I mean, I think we're always living in very uncertain times since 2020, since the
01:04pandemic. It feels like just everything is so uncertain all the time. And I think it's
01:09easy to go, oh my God, like, this is really bad. But with the play, I kind of wanted to
01:15explore that, you know, we've actually got it pretty good right now, compared to how it
01:20could be.
01:22You've had such an interesting journey with this piece, haven't you? You're saying it
01:26started as a poem, became a song, and then it was slightly sprung on you to turn it into
01:31a theatre show.
01:31Yes. So it started as a poem during a really bad heat wave in London. I thought, oh my God,
01:39this is nothing like I've ever experienced before, like climate change is bad. And I've
01:45been involved in environmental activism ever since I was sort of 18 years old. But that
01:51was especially spooky when it got that bad. So I wrote a poem about it, which then turned
01:57into a song. And then a friend of mine who runs Grimfest in London, which is a horror
02:03theatre festival, said, we're doing a scratch night. Do you have anything? And I said, yes,
02:08I have a song. And she went, well, could you write something to go alongside it, make it
02:12a bit longer? Because the slots are about five to 10 minutes. And I went, oh, OK. And then
02:17here we are, basically a year later. It's a full hour long play with music.
02:22Fantastic. And lovely that you're doing it in Chichester, given that you spend so much time
02:26in the Etienne area, haven't you? Your first time performing in Chichester.
02:32No, definitely. And I think growing up partly around Chichester and West Sussex definitely
02:39inspired me as a creative. And the work I do is all very, I was saying, it's quite like
02:45fable-like. There's always a sort of message to the stories. And I think that definitely comes
02:50from being exposed to local folklore of the area. I've always, I do sort of folk horror
02:56as well. I've got a film called Black Sandfire we're doing with my production company, which
03:00is set in West Sussex and around Chichester. So a lot of my work circulates the area really
03:08and is inspired by what I was exposed to growing up there.
03:12It must be a nice sense of coming home. Well, it sounds terrific. It's the Chichester Fringe
03:17at the Havana on Tuesday, June the 10th. Cathy, lovely to speak to you. Thank you.
03:23Thank you so much.